I watch a bunch of TV to get me through my workouts, and right now I don’t have a default thing of the right length that I’ve got momentum on, so I thought I would take the opportunity to ask for recommendations. I’ll list a bunch of things I’m in some sense “currently in the middle of,” and you can either suggest other stuff you think I might like or else ask what I like about the things I’ve listed. I am not current on anything: I watch DVDs or Netflix, so “current season” stuff will be spoilers for me.

Oh, and: I am a tough sell for sexual violence. It’s not a hard, fast line for me–for example, I watch Criminal Minds–but it’s pretty easy to hit my “this is no fun any more and I’m taking my marbles and going home” threshold on things like a certain popular soapy historical drama this season.

I am not at all limited to English language stuff, but the pacing of 22-minute episodes has to hit me right–some anime does and some doesn’t. Almost no live-action English-language stuff does. 55-minute shows can work, but they frustrate me because they’re pretty much exactly the wrong length for what I need for workouts. 40-to-44 are great, as are the 80-to-90 blocks.

It's a police procedural that takes police procedure seriously. I just rewatched season one of Durham County too, and if anyone grabbed a witness, shoved a photo of the prime suspect in their face, and demanded, "What about this guy? Did you see him?" on Scott & Bailey, it would have been a plot point that that cop just made that witness's evidence unusable.

One of the great pleasures of watching these police officers build good cases by following the rules is watching Janet Scott's interrogations. She doesn't use the Reid technique that we often see in American cop shows. I assume she's using the PEACE model.

No Smurfettes. Three main characters, all women. Real working relationships and real friendships, just like real life. Sometimes the friendships and working relationships affect each other badly, just like real life.

No torture porn, not even the kind that only lingers on the victim's fear, or the aftermath of the crime. We see the officers looking at terrible things, and hear them talking about them, but the camera mostly does not look directly at terrible things.

Except. Here's the bad part. In order to make it juicy enough for television, each season has a plot that makes one of the main characters a crime victim, and in each of those plots we get to watch the main character suffer and fear death.

I'd like to see them get a fourth season and figure out what to do instead. I do think the three seasons that exist are really good television.

If you would like to check out the pretty first, go here: http://nomorecasualty.livejournal.com/94979.htmlNot just the collage she labelled FACES but pretty much all of them make me say yes I want to see what story led up to those faces yes!